GNSS-based navigation for lunar descent and landing: performance results

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) interest in lunar exploration has motivated research on systems which could increase the robustness of the navigation architecture of future lunar exploration missions and improve their autonomous operation capabilities. Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are currently used in space missions, not only as a navigation sensor but also as a science instrument. Although their use has been generally limited to orbits below the GNSS constellations, recent studies have shown that GNSS-based navigation for GEO and HEO missions is feasible and with relatively good performances, demonstrating its applicability to a wide range of space missions. The LunarGNSS project (funded by ESA and led by DEIMOS Engenharia in cooperation with Politecnico di Torino, Thales Alenia Space – France, DEIMOS Space and Thales Alenia Space – Italy) went far beyond GEO, analysing the feasibility and performance of a navigation solution based on GPS and Galileo for missions to the Moon and focusing on the investigation of the use of weak GNSS signals to provide real-time navigation capabilities to various future lunar assets. An overview of the methodology and tools used in the LunarGNSS project, along with the proposed solution and results, have been presented by the authors in the past. Nonetheless, in the scope of a project extension targeting the increase of the results’ representativeness, the simulator was upgraded and some of the simulations were repeated with more realistic GNSS transmitting antenna patterns. This paper provides an overview of the LunarGNSS project and presents some of the results of the LunarGNSS project’s extension, focusing on the Descent & Landing phase and taking into account the latest results, obtained with more realistic antenna patterns.